Sensor alignment systems and methods are provided, and in particular systems and methods are provided for aligning a magnetostrictive sensor.
Ferromagnetic materials can have magnetostrictive properties that can cause the materials to change shape in the presence of an applied magnetic field. The inverse can also be true. When a stress is applied to a conductive material, magnetic properties of the material, such as magnetic permeability, can change. A magnetostrictive sensor is a non-contact sensor that can include sensing elements configured to sense the changes in magnetic permeability and, because the changes can be proportional to the amount of stresses applied to the conductive material, the resulting measurement can be used to calculate the amount of stress.
The changes in the magnetic permeability arising from an application of stress to the conductive material can be small. To facilitate measurement of small magnetic permeability changes, measurement errors due to a gap distance between the sensing elements of the magnetostrictive sensor and the target can be accounted for when calculating the stress applied to the target. As an example, magnetostrictive sensors can be manually aligned with the target and the gap distance can be set by a gauge. However, such manual align can result in different gaps between the target and each sensing element and it can fail to properly compensate for the gap distance.